The third phase of the Revolution

The first phase of the Consciousness Revolution is about understanding conscious experience as such, about what I have been calling the Tunnel. It is well under way and yielding results. The second phase will go to the core of the problem by unraveling the mysteries of the first-person perspective and of what I have been calling the Ego. This phase has begun, as exemplified by the recent flurry of scientific papers and books on agency, free will, emotions, mind-reading, and self-consciousness in general.

The third phase will inevitably lead us back to the normative dimension of this historical transition — into anthropology, ethics, and political philosophy. It will confront us with a host of new questions about what we want to do with all this new knowledge about ourselves, and about how to deal with the new possibilities resulting from it. How are we to live with this brain? Which states of consciousness are beneficial, and which are harmful to us? How will we integrate this new awareness into our culture and our society? What are the likely consequences of a clash of anthropologies — of the increasing competition between the old and the new images of humanity?

Now we can understand why rational neuroanthropology is so important: We need an empirically plausible platform for the ethical debates to come. Recall that I previously stressed how important it is to separate these two questions clearly: What is a human being? And what should a human being become?

Consider a simple example. In our recent Western past, religion was a private affair: You believed in whatever you wanted to believe. In the future, however, people who believe in the existence of a soul or in life after death may no longer meet with twentieth-century Western tolerance but with condescension — much as do people who continue to claim that the sun revolves around the Earth. We may no longer be able to regard our own consciousness as a legitimate vehicle for our metaphysical hopes and desires. Political economist and sociologist Max Weber famously spoke of the “disenchantment of the world,” as rationalization and science led Europe and America into modern industrial society, pushing back religion and all “magical” theories about reality. Now we are witnessing the disenchantment of the self.

One of the many dangers in this process is that if we remove the magic from our image of ourselves, we may also remove it from our image of others. We could become disenchanted with one another. Our image of Homo sapiens underlies our everyday practice and culture; it shapes the way we treat one another as well as how we subjectively experience ourselves. In Western societies, the Judeo-Christian image of humankind — whether you are a believer or not — has secured a minimal moral consensus in everyday life. It has been a major factor in social cohesion. Now that the neurosciences have irrevocably dissolved the Judeo-Christian image of a human being as containing an immortal spark of the divine, we are beginning to realize that they have not substituted anything that could hold society together and provide a common ground for shared moral intuitions and values. An anthropological and ethical vacuum may well follow on the heels of neuroscientific findings.

This is a dangerous situation. One potential scenario is that long before neuroscientists and philosophers have settled any of the perennial issues — for example, the nature of the self, the freedom of the will, the relationship between mind and brain, or what makes a person a person — a vulgar materialism might take hold. More and more people will start telling themselves: “I don’t understand what all these neuroexperts and consciousness philosophers are talking about, but the upshot seems pretty clear to me. The cat is out of the bag: We are gene-copying biorobots, living out here on a lonely planet in a cold and empty physical universe. We have brains but no immortal souls, and after seventy years or so the curtain drops. There will never be an afterlife, or any kind of reward or punishment for anyone, and ultimately everyone is alone. I get the message, and you had better believe I will adjust my behavior to it. It would probably be smart not to let anybody know I’ve seen through the game. The most efficient strategy will be to go on pretending I’m a conservative, old-fashioned believer in moral values.” And so on.

We are already experiencing a naturalistic turn in the human image, and it looks as if there is no way back. The third phase of the Consciousness Revolution will affect our image of ourselves much more dramatically than any scientific revolution in the past. We will gain much, but we will pay a price. Therefore, we must intelligently assess the psychosocial cost.

The current explosion of knowledge in the empirical mind sciences is completely uncontrolled, with a multilevel dynamic of its own, and its speed is increasing. It is also unfolding in an ethical vacuum, driven solely by individual career interests and uninfluenced by political considerations. In the developed countries, it is widening the gap between the academically educated and scientifically well-informed, who are open to the scientific worldview, and those who have never even heard of notions such as “the neural correlate of consciousness” or “phenomenal selfmodel.” There are many people who cling to metaphysical belief systems, fearing that their inner Lebenswelt, or life-world, will be colonized by the new mind sciences. On the global level, the gap between developed and developing countries is widening as well: More than 80 percent of the human beings on this planet, especially those in poorer countries with growing populations, are still firmly rooted in prescientific cultures. Many of them will not even want to hear about the neural correlates of consciousness or the phenomenal self-model. For them especially, the transition will come much too quickly, and it also will come from countries that systematically oppressed and exploited them in the past.

The growing divide threatens to increase traditional sources of conflict. Therefore, leading researchers in the early stages of the Consciousness Revolution have a responsibility to guide us through this third phase. Scientists and academic philosophers cannot simply confine themselves to making contributions to a comprehensive theory of consciousness and the self. If moral obligation exists, they must also confront the anthropological and normative void they have created. They must communicate their results in laymen’s language and explain the developments to those members of society whose taxes pay their salaries. (This was one of my reasons for writing this book.) They cannot simply put all their ambition and intelligence into their scientific careers while destroying everything humankind has believed in for the past twenty-five hundred years.

Let us assume that the naturalistic turn in the image of Homo sapiens is irrevocable and that a strong version of materialism develops, in which case we can no longer consider ourselves immortal beings of divine origin, intimately related to some personal God. At the same time — and this point is frequently overlooked — our view of the physical universe itself will have undergone a radical change. We will now have to assume that the universe has an intrinsic potential for subjectivity. We will suddenly understand that the physical universe evolved not only life and biological organisms with nervous systems but also consciousness, world models, and robust first-person perspectives, thereby opening the door to what might be called the social universe: to high-level symbolic communication, to the evolution of ideas.

We are special. We manifest a significant phase transition. We brought a strong form of subjectivity into the physical universe — a form of subjectivity mediated by concepts and theories. In the extremely limited part of reality known to us, we are the only sentient creatures for whom the sheer fact of our individual existence poses a theoretical problem. We invented philosophy and science and started an openended process of gaining self-reflective knowledge. That is to say, we are purely physical beings whose representational capacities have become so strong that they allowed us to form scientific communities and intellectual traditions. Because our subsymbolic, transparent self-model functions as an anchor for our opaque, cognitive Ego, we were able to become thinkers of thoughts. We were able to cooperate in constructing abstract entities that move through time and are constantly optimized. We call these entities “theories.”

Now we are entering an unprecedented stage: Centuries of philosophical searching for a theory of consciousness have culminated in a rigorous empirical project that is progressing incrementally and in a sustainable manner. This process is recursive, in that it will also change the contents and the functional structure of our self-models. This fact tells us something about the physical universe in which all these events are occurring: The universe has a potential not only for the self-organization of life and the evolution of strong subjectivity but also for an even higher level of complexity. I will not go so far as to say that in us the physical universe becomes conscious of itself. Nevertheless, the emergence of coherent conscious reality-models in biological nervous systems created a new form of self-similarity within the physical universe. The world evolved world-modelers. Parts began to mirror the whole. Billions of conscious brains are like billions of eyes, with which the universe can look at itself as being present.

More important, the world evolved self-modelers who were able to form groups; the process of increasing self-similarity via internal modeling jumped from nervous systems to scientific communities. Another new quality was created. These groups in turn created theoretical portraits of the universe and of consciousness, as well as a rigorous strategy of continually improving these portraits. Through science, the dynamic processes of self-modeling and of world-modeling were extended into the symbolic, the social, and the historical dimensions: We became rational theory-makers. We used the unity of consciousness to search for the unity of knowledge, and we also discovered the idea of moral integrity. The conscious self-model of Homo sapiens made this step possible.

Ultimately, any convincing and truly satisfying neuroanthropology must do justice to facts like these. It must tell us what exactly in the conscious self-model of human beings made this highly specific transition possible — a transition that not only was crucial to the biological history of consciousness on this planet but also changed the nature of the physical universe.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-31